J. H. King (1869—1946)

Country of Origin

  • United States

Countries/Regions of Ministry

  • United States
  • Canada, Mexico
  • UK, Norway, Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland
  • China, Hong Kong, India, Sri Lanka

Traditions

  • Methodist
  • Pentecostal

Ministries

  • Denominational leader
  • Evangelist
  • Pastor

Joseph Hillery King was an outstanding leader in early North American Pentecostalism. By the time of his "world tour" of Asian Pentecostal foreign mission stations and Western European Pentecostal centers, in 1910-1912, he was one of the movement’s rising luminaries.[1] He was also a major Pentecostal theologian in the United States between 1900-1925, and “the most articulate early spokesperson” for Pentecostalism’s Wesleyan-Holiness theological subtradition.[2] His magnum opus was From Passover to Pentecost, published in 1914 and enlarged in a second edition in 1934.

King was born near Anderson, South Carolina in 1869. The primary spiritual and religious environment of his upbringing, after his family moved to Franklin County, Georgia, was a rural Methodist Episcopal Church South (MECS) congregation. At fifteen years of age, God called him to preach. At sixteen, he was revivalistically converted to the Christian faith and claimed the post-conversion experience of Wesleyan entire sanctification.

Beginning in 1890, King progressed up the ranks of credentialled ministry in the MECS and later the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) to ordination as an elder. He also received a divinity certificate from a MEC seminary. For seven years, King served MEC congregational circuits in middle and northern Georgia. In 1898, he joined B. H. Irwin’s Fire-Baptized Holiness Association of America (FBHAA), a Wesleyan-Holiness sect, as an ordained evangelist. He was impressed by the spiritual fervency of their meetings and their apparent success in getting people saved and entirely sanctified.

From 1900 to 1911, King was the General Overseer of the FBHAA (Fire-Baptized Holiness Church [FBHC], beginning in 1902). For the first six years, he led the organization in removing what leadership viewed as emotional, mystical, experiential, demonstrative, public worship, and doctrinal extremism. As he attempted to safeguard order in public worship, he opposed behavior that appeared fanatical or extravagant. After receiving his own life- and ministry-transforming experience of the "third blessing" or tongues-attested Spirit baptism, in 1907, King led the group and joined it to the Pentecostal movement in 1908.

The FBHC merged with the Pentecostal Holiness Church (PHC) in 1911 while King was on his two-year international mission. He served as an official FBHC ambassador in Shanghai and Sai Nam, China and Hong Kong, and for the PHC in India, Sri Lanka, and several nations in western and northern Europe. In the latter, he ministered alongside European Pentecostal pioneers including Thomas Ball Barratt, Alexander Boddy, Cecil Polhill, Jonathan Paul, and Gerrit Polman. King then held the post of PHC General Superintendent from 1917-1937. He served as one of the multiple General Superintendents until his death, and for five of those years as Chair of the organization's General Board. At the 1937 General Conference, he was given the honorary title of Bishop along with Rev. Dan Muse.  

King's major contributions to the history, development, and culture of the FBHC and PHC were threefold. (They were the main reasons why he was affectionately dubbed "the Pentecostal aristocrat" by the 1940s). One, he passionately pursued quality elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education for the Holiness constituency. Two, he worked persistently for adequate biblical and ministerial training for clergy. Three, he labored for a balanced approach to Pentecostal spirituality and public worship. He discouraged what some considered to be excesses in Irwin's founding theology. The most infamous error he rejected was the teaching of multiple and normative post-conversion, post-entire sanctification experiences of Spirit empowerment--labeled the baptisms of dynamite, lyddite, selenite, and oxydite. At one point he referred to such dogma as "happifying ignorance" and urged sound wisdom and sobriety in Spirit baptism theology.[3]

Bishop King died in 1946. His posthumously published memoirs were entitled Yet Speaketh, drawing from the Authorized Version of Hebrew 11:4, that "He being dead yet speaketh." 

NOTES

[1] Allan Anderson, Spreading Fires: The Missionary Nature of Early Pentecostalism (Orbis Books, 2007), 98. 

[2] Douglas Jacobsen, Thinking in the Spirit: Theologies of the Early Pentecostal Movement (Indiana University Press, 2003), ix-xiii, 14, 136, 164. 

[3] J. H. King, “From the General Superintendent,” Pentecostal Holiness Advocate 1.19 (6 Sept. 1917): 10. 

Tony G. Moon
Emmanuel College
 

For Further Reading:

  • King, J. H. From Passover to Pentecost. LifeSprings Resources, 2004.
  • Moon, Tony G. From Plowboy to Pentecostal Bishop: The Life of J. H. King. Lexington, KY: Emeth Press, 2017. 


©9/2/2026